NEW BOY

New Boy, Tracy Chevalier, Hogarth Shakespeare, 2017, 204 pp

 

 

New Boy is a retelling of Othello set in a 1970s elementary school in Washington, DC. In those days elementary went up to 6th grade, followed by 7th and 8th grades for junior high. The kids in the story are sixth graders.

 

All the major characters from the play are represented. Osei Kokote is Othello. He is the son of an African diplomat, used to being the new boy as this is his fifth school in five years and used to being the lone Black boy. Beautiful, blond Dee, the most popular girl and her teacher's pet, plays the Desdemona character. Between two recess periods on Osei's first day at school, he and Dee are beginning a relationship.

The dastardly sociopath Ian takes Iago's part and decides to destroy the budding attraction between Dee and the new boy. He employs his sycophantish friend Rod and recent girlfriend Mimi to rig various situations on the playground.

 

For much of the novel I was a bit bored. Aside from some trigger words it felt like a young adult story. The writing is simple in style and the kids are usual preteens. Gradually I began to admire the true to life racism, the volatile upheavals between classmates, and the sexual attractions and competitions. Yes, I remember to this day how it was when we were twelve going on thirteen.

 

Even though I had just read the Shakespeare play and knew it would end in tragedy, I wanted things to end happily for Dee and Osei. I hoped at least one of the bumbling and clueless faculty would act intelligently enough to save the day. 

 

I closed the book full of admiration for the author's intricate portrayals of Shakespeare's tale of bullying, betrayal and jealousy. She captured every nuance of the play. I think New Boy should be required reading for middle school teachers and parents of preteens. The kids probably don't need to read it. They are living it.

 

I found myself pondering the book for days and comparing it to The Hate U Give which I had read just two weeks earlier.

 

 

(New Boy is available in hardcover and paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

BOOKS READ IN MARCH

March sure was Reading Month for me. I read the highest number of books in one month for this year so far. I even cleaned the house once and worked out at least 3 days a week. I hope I can keep up this energy level for the rest of the year!

Stats: 13 books read, 10 fiction, 1 nonfiction, 1 drama, 1 poetry collection, 5 by women, 2 from My Big Fat Reading Project list, and 3 translated.

Favorites: The Sympathizer, Voices From Chernobyl, and Contenders.

Least favorite: Near to the Wild Heart.

Most of my reviews of these books have not made it to the blog yet, but stay tuned. I may have to post more often to get caught up!

The books are:

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What did you read in March? Which ones did you like, which ones not so much?

THE GAP OF TIME

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The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson, Hogarth Shakespeare, 2015, 273 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s “late plays.” It tells the story of a king whose jealousy results in the banishment of his baby daughter and the death of his beautiful wife. His daughter is found and brought up by a shepherd on the Bohemian coast, but through a series of extraordinary events, father and daughter, and eventually mother too, are reunited.

In The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of The Winter’s Tale, we move from London, a city reeling after the 2008 financial crisis, to a storm-ravaged American city called New Bohemia. Her story is one of childhood friendship, money, status, technology and the elliptical nature of time. Written with energy and wit, this is a story of the consuming power of jealousy on the one hand, and redemption and the enduring love of a lost child on the other.

 

My Review:

There is probably not another writer who could make me read a Shakespeare play. Jeanette Winterson, whose writing always excites me, has filled the role that no English teacher ever played for me during my school days. Because I had not realized she included a summary of The Winter’s Tale at the beginning of her retelling, I read the play first and enjoyed it more than I expected I would. That in turn enhanced the sheer fun of reading The Gap of Time.

It is a story that works on the equation of jealousy plus power equals bad stuff happens. Leo, an unemployed banker following the crash of 2008, was so talented at making money that he started his own hedge fund in the middle of the ensuing recession and became disgustingly wealthy. Then he convinced the beautiful and talented MiMi, famous songstress, to marry him. Yet within eight years, just before the birth of their second child, Leo fell into an insane jealous conviction that MiMi and his best friend were having an affair, meaning the baby was not his. Using his wealth and power he proceeded to ruin numerous lives and lose everyone he cared about.

In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes is a King, Hermione is his queen, and Polixenes, also a King, is Leontes’s childhood friend. Leo is the modern equivalent of royalty, a king of finance. Xeno creates brilliant games and takes the video sport to sophisticated new levels of content. He is also gay, in love with both Leo and MiMi, though not cuckolding Leo. It’s complicated, as we say in modern parlance. A tragic love triangle as they said in the 1600s.

Shakespeare, being Shakespeare, spiced his play with humor. I don’t know enough about his oeuvre to speak of his talent for tragicomedy. I do know that Jeanette Winterson ran with the comic bits, making use of the dark hilarity in our modern era. As far as philosophizing about tragedy and time, her talent is equal to the bard’s.

Within the first twelve pages she is slinging around sentences like this: “You think you’re living in the present but the past is right behind you like a shadow.”  “What is memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past?” “I discover that grief means living with someone who is not there.”

The Winter’s Tale has a dearth of back story. Winterson provides us with plenty: how Leo and Xeno became best friends in boarding school after some severe maternal rejection; how Leo met MiMi and got Xeno to play Cupid during his days of courting; how the man who ended up raising Perdita, the daughter Leo gave away, came to be the wise and cool dude he is; and a few more. Brilliantly done because the somewhat unlikely happy ending in the play becomes a believable outcome in the novel.

I could say more. It is a complex tale and several other characters help make it so. An abundance of delectable scenes, snappy dialogue, and digressions about the vagaries of time, make the reader feel she is watching a Shakespeare play. I don’t want to spoil the magic.

  

THE WINTER'S TALE

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The Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare, early 1600s, read in The Riverside Shakespeare, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974. Play is 38 pp.

 

 

Summary from Goodreads:

One of Shakespeare's later plays, best described as a tragic-comedy, the play falls into two distinct parts. In the first Leontes is thrown into a jealous rage by his suspicions of his wife Hermione and his best-friend, and imprisons her and orders that her new born daughter be left to perish. The second half is a pastoral comedy with the "lost" daughter Perdita having been rescued by shepherds and now in love with a young prince. The play ends with former lovers and friends reunited after the apparently miraculous resurrection of Hermione.

My Review:

My reading friends know me as a Shakespeare hater. When I've had a drink or two I can come across that way. In reality I am a Shakespeare wimp. Reading his plays are just too much work. But I was planning to read and professionally review The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson's retelling of The Winter's Tale. Her novel is the first in a series of retellings of Shakespeare plays planned by the Hogarth Press.

So I hunkered down on Halloween weekend with my friend's Riverside Shakespeare and one of those plot summaries you can find on the internet and I made my way through, footnotes and all. I have read that this is considered one of his "lesser" plays. I liked it, but what do I know?

The theme is jealousy, specifically male jealousy. King Leontes observes his best friend King Polixenes being overly nice to Leontes's pregnant wife and spirals down into insane and violent jealousy. Everyone is harmed: the friend, the wife, the young son and heir, and the newborn baby.

The rest of the play trails through a complicated maze of secrets, mistaken identities, comedy, and madness. It's a mess and ends with some things made right though the damage cannot be undone. Jealousy + Power = Bad.

I was made to read Othello and maybe a couple others in high school and college. All I remember is "the quality of mercy is not strained" and "to be or not to be." As an adult I have read A Midsummer Night's Dream and liked it. The Tempest was also not bad.

I know the Bard has influenced literature as much as, if not more than, the Bible and folk tales. Having read The Winter's Tale surely did enrich my enjoyment of The Gap of Time which I finished last night.

Have I made a breakthrough as a reader? Have I grown up enough? Do you read Shakespeare?

(The Winter's Tale is available in many paperback editions with summaries and footnotes by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)